The stormy weather was a nuisance to everyone. Patience wore thin in my apartment, tested by the whispering wind that whistled through the cracks in the building structure. The heater was down, and the only thing keeping the apartment toasty was an assortment of hot tempers and a can of coffee powder, the aroma of which permeated each room of my cold abode. The coffee kept my nerves twisted at the ends, zapping each synapse in my brain with an excessive charge for every thought that came to mind, the feeling of which was comparable to sitting on an electric chair with faulty wiring—an initial jolt of pain, followed by a heightened state of self-consciousness. It was coffee that kept me alive in college, that kept me company in obscene hours late at night, and that uncompromisingly worked its way into my life in the same way the internet had. For all its advantages, the downside to it was simply negligible in comparison. The coffee kept my eyes open in class, but sedated every cell that constituted my brain. I hated coffee. It was essentially a superficial drug, a miracle drug that extended working capacity (or the looks of it), for the sake of working more, doing more, and being more. Yet, it was and still is an integral part of my college life, as it fuels the energy to satisfy my need to be more than myself. It was coffee that gave my roommates and me the strength to look charming, think quick, react fast, and carry ourselves well. We consumed coffee like a designer drug and used it like mascara and foundation, to highlight the beautiful side of ourselves. We needed it to be beautiful in our own right. We still do.
Humans are social beings. We look for trends in fashion, buy magazines to check out the latest styles, work out at the gym for the ever elusive abdominal six-pack , and spend countless hours on personal grooming, all just to look good in the eyes of other people. We spend billions of dollars annually on cosmetic surgery, diet formulas, spa treatments and beauty products, all in the name of looking good, sometimes for the love of our lives, and sometimes for total strangers on the streets. Teenagers aspire to be as sexy as Angelina Jolie and as timeless as Audrey Hepburn, as slim as Kate Moss and as radiant as Beyonce, all in the name of beauty.
But why the need for beauty? Alice Walker in her essay Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self recollects the story of her ugly past, where the loss of sight in one eye to an unfortunate accident paints a clear picture of the need for beauty in individuals. It was not being blind in one eye that was her grievance, but rather the hideous imprint of white scar tissue on it that served as a haunting reminder of her lack of physical beauty. One night after her cousin visits, she verbalizes her thoughts of her disability with “I do not pray for sight. I pray for beauty (Walker, Encounters pg 621).” It was shocking at first, the seeming lack of depth in her thinking. What in the world was this shallow girl thinking? To desire image more than functionality; it was tantamount to owning a Ferrari that didn’t work, as long as it served its purpose by looking magnificent in the garage.
Society however, has conditioned every one of us to be self-conscious. In our early childhood, we are conditioned to believe girls should look like princesses and Barbie dolls, while boys should be strong and macho like Prince Charming or G.I. Joe. “Don’t cry,” my mother told me, “or you won’t look handsome, and no one will want you.” I grew up with these words in mind, taking care not to fall into the trap of looking ugly in front of others lest I become a pariah, just like Walker did in school. Her eye brought her more than taunts and troubled stares. It brought her an ‘F’ in confidence, after which other aspects of her life tumbled down like falling dominoes. These repercussions in the mental and emotional states of individuals exhibiting physical disfigurement have not occurred by chance. It is primarily the inability to fit in with the social norm of being healthy, full-bodied individuals that has plagued them with a strong sense of discontentment and even self-hatred. The breaking down of self-worth in these individuals is thus a direct result of not just being different, but being ugly.
Schools worldwide are innocent vectors of society’s unjust expectations of beauty from each individual. Students from Tokyo to Tuscaloosa are invariably classified as ‘Cheerleaders and Jocks’ or ‘Nerds and Geeks’ among countless other labels in an insidious attempt to promote the beautiful, the cool and the successful as objects of public admiration and emulation. These social divisions carry on in each individual’s psyche after graduation, perpetuating well into their working lives. Corporations look out for the suave and the sassy as the face of their companies, just as in the movie American Beauty two competing real estate agents believe that to succeed they must live by the maxim: “One must portray an image of success at all times.” Millions of working class people embrace the effects of coffee in an effort to beautify their image as organizational assets by prolonging their ability to remain productive when otherwise ineffective. The ability of coffee to rejuvenate the tired body has found its way in the drive for beauty in personal perfection, where it functions as another tool to propagate the image of success.
The curse of a lack of beauty can be overturned when the individual is able to surmount the stigma of his own physical imperfection. The movie Gattaca concludes with the implicit definition of beauty stemming not from the physical perfection of the ‘genetically optimized’ humans, but from the triumph of ordinary humans in overcoming their personal imperfections, seen when the lead character Vincent, swam faster than his genetically perfected companion despite being of ‘inferior’ genes. There is not one successful Paralympian that did not suffer mocking insults from the man in the street, but we see the beauty in their triumph, the triumph of the human spirit over physical disability and disfigurement. It is most unfortunate that many of the disabled do not possess hearts brave enough for the struggle to find truth in their own beauty, instead faltering like falling stars in the paths of their lives, succumbing to their disabilities as victims of societal abuse.
The extent of this beautiful disease has its roots owing to the innate desire to procreate. The laws of natural selection wired the human brain to desire traits in the opposite sex exhibiting fertility and health or the ability to provide, in order to ensure the survival of the family line. Well proportioned men with larger frames and muscular structure exhibited the ability to protect the familial unit and hunt for food, whilst women with shapely hips and well groomed features like shiny hair and clean features subconsciously spelt fertility and health, and the ability to care for the family. These subconscious definitions of beauty have found their way into modern society, albeit a little modified by thousands of years of cultural influences.
Although the social notions of a desirable partner have progressed with the advent of technology, certain desirable traits like a lean body or long healthy hair have remained despite their loss of relevance in providing for the family. Ladies continue to prefer relatively well built guys with washboard abdominals despite the lack of relevance of these characteristics in bread winning or territorial possession in the age of computers and paper warfare. Similarly, the disabled and the disfigured have continued to be seen as the ‘shame’ of human civilization. Hitler tried to administer large scale euthanasia for the physically and mentally disabled during the Third Reich, as they were far from being ‘perfect humans’ and held no beauty in his eyes. In Biblical times as portrayed in the movie Ben Hur, lepers were exiled as they were too ‘dangerous’ to be helped, and the loss of their appendages was too ugly to bear in a society that has continued to value physical beauty over mental ingenuity. With all these in mind, people have come to regard beauty as a trait as important as intelligence and character in the selection of a partner.
This social poison has benefited the cosmetics and accessories industries at the expense of our personal health. With many people willing to bear with self-inflicted torture for the sake of ‘style’ or beauty, manifesting itself in the form of corsets in Europe and bound feet in China, or high-heeled shoes (which upsets the natural balance of the body and exerts excessive stress on the calves and lower back) as a latter-day example, it is glaringly frightening how physical beauty has become an unspoken evil that has influenced everyone in their judgment of anything and everything. Many people have been tortured indirectly by the quest for acceptance by becoming beautiful, as seen in the swelling numbers of people affected by anorexia nervosa and bulimia; these are people who feel the overwhelming desire to be slim so as to look more attractive and thus feel more accepted by society.
Amy Tan analyzes the role of society and its judgments on the individual in her essay Mother Tongue, which initially criticizes her mother’s non-conforming, unbeautiful, fragmented, ‘broken’ English. Yet, upon careful consideration and retrospect, Tan came to see the beauty in the imperfect English that her mother spoke, and has successfully incorporated elements of her ‘mother tongue’ into award-winning pieces of literature as seen in The Joy Luck Club. Similarly, the role of society in determining what is beautiful today is overwhelming; yet we must try to exercise to the furthest extent the opinion of love and reason as the judge of beauty. There is beauty in the imperfect, especially in the perfection of their efforts to explore and expose their inner beauty. Helen Keller is one such individual who, guided by the love of her family and her teacher Sullivan, became the best that she could be. Just like Walker, Keller was distraught at the loss of her senses and beauty at a young age. Yet she was able to overcome the obstacles of being both blind and deaf with the help of patience and love. Such is the beauty that is in her.
Thus it is evident the role love and family plays in every individual’s definition of beauty. In American Beauty, Jane, the very ordinary daughter in a dysfunctional family experiences conflict in her perceived definition of beauty. The movie starts out with her believing in the words of her ‘beautiful’ friend, Angela: “There is nothing worse than being ordinary” and goes on to reveal her desire to be more beautiful when she explores the option of external beautification by the process of breast augmentation, despite her evidently ample bosom. It is evident how the lack of closeness within her family shows the lack of support necessary for her to come to terms with her ‘ordinary’ body as perceived by society and be beautiful in her own way, whereas in Beauty, Walker has the benefit of her family’s encouragement in the repeated assurances of “You did not change” (Walker, Encounters pg 621), and eventually betters her position after coming to terms with her own beauty after an eye operation.
The role of beauty in society does not limit itself to the individual: the advent of modern technology in genetic engineering and medical advancement has opened many a Pandora’s Box as to the morality of life. Should we be allowed to play God with our offspring, selecting physical and perceived behavioral traits within each embryo to our desired configuration and notion of beauty? Should parents be given the power to decide the fate of an unborn child should the child be afflicted with physical or mental disfiguration? The role of society in the fate of every individual can exact a massive amount of pressure on parents-to-be in decision making for their unborn children. Is it ethically sound for parents to decide on the separation of conjoined twins for reasons of beautification, additionally so if the separation of the twins results in a higher chance for life threatening complications to occur? The decision to take the risk may at first glance seem purely superficial, yet we seldom recognize that possessing a more beautiful appearance could be the ticket to a better life for the child, as compared to a life full of rude stares, pointing fingers and rejection.
Similarly, is it acceptable for us all to take for granted the works of beauty spawning from the talents of artists suffering from various mental maladies such as manic depression? Masterpieces of art in every form have come from mentally ‘unbeautiful’ persons, but should we expect them to pay the price for society’s appreciation of beauty? For much of the 16th to 19th centuries, depressed artists and musicians suffered under the pressures of conformist society, due to a lack of research and understanding of depression and other mental illnesses. Yet, their works of expression represent beauty in its raw form; unbridled, passionate, and magical, like a shooting star singing in the midst of a symphony of a starry starry night. This duality serves to accentuate the hypocrisy of shallow beauty against the purity of experiencing genuine beauty. Ultimately, the choice for pursuit of genuine beauty belongs to the artist, but in the words of Kay Redfield Jamison, a victim and researcher of bi-polar disorder: “I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and have been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs, for all the winters…” We are thus led to understand better another role of beauty in society in a novel way, by the dedication of the imperfect in seeking genuine beauty.
Ultimately where beauty is contrived, shallow beauty does serve to set an easier standard for living by convincing society that beauty is but a target defined by changing trends in general perception, whereas the strife for genuine beauty and meaning has been known to be the cause of death for some of those in its pursuit. Don McLean could not have been more succinct when he sang in Starry Starry Night, “but I could have told you Vincent, this world was never made for one as beautiful as you.”
